Drown #7.3: the caretakers

April, 2085 — Stephanie Nova and Justin Kim are 25, Keri Riley is 24. Jeremy Nova is 69, Alice is 63, Lily is 2. Willow is 3.


You could see them up there in the daytime, if you looked really hard and in just the right light. Stephanie thought they looked like a swarm of metal insects, with their patterned synchronized movements. They didn’t seem to be doing anything at all that anyone knew of. They just flew.

After a couple of weeks, people began to go outside again once it became clear that the things weren’t trying to attack us. It was springtime at the end of the world, who wouldn’t want to see the trees and flowers blossom one last time? So people went jogging and walked their children to the playground. They should have been more unnerved than they were, maybe, but the sound these things made was not unpleasant.

Stephanie thought the sound was almost lovely, almost melodious, like listening to music as she ran. The things streaked across the sky at all hours, never stopping. The noise went on and on since they'd arrived, steady and constant, not enough to overpower the wind or the rain or the waves, but lying underneath it. It became the background noise of the whole world.

Rumors were that the military shot one out of the sky and was dissecting it. They were only rumors though. People talked on the sidewalks and playgrounds. People made up their own stories about what they didn't know.



Two of Stephanie's daycare kids didn't come over anymore. Their parents had stopped going to work, although it was half and half with most people. People still needed money, but people were also scared.

The houses along the lakeshore kept being looted and burnt down, and now some of the houses and apartments near town were seeing trouble, too. Stephanie's neighbors took in a young couple who were trying to find family to stay with in Minnesota after their apartment building was broken into. But here, it was ten minutes from the shore and five minutes from town, which seemed to be just far enough to keep the trouble away. That, and the neighborhood had finally agreed that guards at the main road and a roster of all of their residents was probably a good idea.

If half the world was prepping for the end and the other half kept living, Stephanie didn't know which half she belonged to. A little of both, maybe. There was a finality put on every thought and feeling that made her want to make them count. But then she enjoyed her life right now so much that she never wanted it to end. She wanted to believe that was the best half to be in—both halves.

***

Four months after she did, Justin turned twenty-five. She would always be four months older than he was, but she never felt like the wiser of the two of them. Even if she got wiser all the time, so did he, and he would always be ahead of her. She didn't mind that. She'd actually come to rely on it.


"Congratulations on being a real grown up," she said to him. "You get cheaper car insurance now and the prefrontal cortex of your brain is fully developed."



To celebrate their newfound maturity, they took the girls out to the arcade and had some ice cream for dinner. But being grown up as they were, they insisted on having fruit salad before their ice cream to make it more of a balanced meal.

They were the caretakers of this world now, it occurred to her. They were the caretakers of their children and their aging parents. Their brains were fully formed and they were as ready as they would ever be for the monumental task of adulthood, all the impulse-control and decision-making skills that entailed. All of that and having to survive and save the world somehow.

The prefrontal cortex of Stephanie's brain was fully formed now, too. She thought of the hasty things she did when she was twenty. She couldn't take back her choices because it doesn't work that way, but she could start to right her wrongs.

Stephanie wanted to take back her maiden name.

She doubted herself a thousand times first, and that was how she knew she wasn't being hasty this time. She asked herself, "If the world is ending, does it really matter that you do this now? How important is this really?" But this was a sensible, grownup decision. If there were still people working at the social security office at city hall, then she wanted to do this. There was one guy left working, so she filed her paperwork and took back her name.


It wasn’t even as big a deal as she knew Jeremiah would make it out to be. Plenty of married women didn’t take their husband’s name anymore, although she guessed that Jeremiah didn’t like those kind of women. She changed Willow’s name on her birth certificate, too, because she wanted them to match. If Jeremiah wanted to have a say in that, he could try to later. She anticipated that he would, but at least she wouldn’t have to deal with that for a while.

It felt like an important first step that she could do before Jeremiah got home—after taking off her wedding ring, that is—but it was a step that he wouldn’t notice, either. It was important to Stephanie. Maybe it was important to Justin, too. She was going to leave Jeremiah some day, and she wanted Justin to know that she really meant it.

When she told Justin what she'd done, he was happy. "Now I can call you Stephanie Supernova again," he said. "Because you're beautiful and you outshine the entire galaxy."

Justin's love didn't make Stephanie feel small. It made her feel bigger than the world.

***

Hikers were the first to notice that there was something wrong with the world. The already thin alpine air had become even thinner. Trees in the mountains began to wither and people couldn’t hike up there anymore.

Then people started getting headaches at lower elevations, too. They took longer to complete their usual runs, they arrived home more out of breath, dizzy, and nauseous. Until one day they went out and had to come straight back. Until another day they got dizzy and passed out on the sidewalks before they could even get back home. What was thought to be a series of air quality alerts was clearly something more serious.


Stephanie did about a mile before her lungs started to burn. She walked home, trying to catch her breath, but got dizzy and fell to her knees in front of the house.

Meteorologists found that the careful balance of nitrogen and oxygen had changed across the globe.

And then everyone knew what the little shits were doing up there. They didn’t want to eat us or enslave us. They didn’t want anything to do with us at all. They didn’t need to come down from the skies because they were here for our air.

The oxygen composition outside had declined already from 21 to 16 percent.


She didn't ask him to, but Justin came straight home from work when she told him she'd been out jogging. He sat with her underneath the living room air vent until she felt better. He made her promise she wouldn't go out jogging again. She promised, but it still made her sad. She wondered if she would ever go jogging in the open air again.

"I'll buy you a treadmill to use in the house," he said.

It wouldn't be the same. The half of her that felt the world was ending only grew bigger, and the hopeful half of her grieved their lost future.

But they would have a future, maybe it would just be a different one. Justin taught her how to check the air levels and change the filters in the house, he showed her how to install a filter for the car, too. He showed her the settings to conserve battery life and air usage, in case they ever needed to make it stretch. He fitted both of their cars with solar chargers. It wasn't the most efficient charge, but if the electric grid went down—when it went down, more likely—they would need it.

When the news went public about the air, Justin knew exactly what to do and he was already prepared for this. They were better prepared than most people. When the announcement went public, home supply stores were overrun. People who had money were buying up air canisters and scalping them for thousands of dollars—a crime, the police declared, too late. But Justin and Stephanie already had enough air to last a few months. The market would calm down, they hoped, before they needed more. It was one less thing they had to worry about and they had Keri to thank for that.

"Thank you," Stephanie messaged to Keri, but Keri didn’t write back.


They could go outside for little more than half an hour at a time, as long as they didn't exert themselves. There were things that needed to be done outside. Grow more plants, they told them, because plants restore oxygen. It was now a punishable crime to cut down any tree.

So Stephanie started to work more in Jeremiah’s garden. Although the garden was much bigger now and most of the plants here were things that she planted and salvaged and grew, not him, so maybe that meant this was her garden now. Jeremiah had been gone for two years. Stephanie grew her own garden and called herself by her own name.

***

The people who lost hope didn't care about peace or the rules anymore. People took what they wanted and when there was nothing left to take, they burned things down. There was nobody here to stop them. Most of the military went out to space, and with no military left on the ground, the police forces were left to war with the invaders how they could. They didn't have the energy to worry about some rich houses along the lakeshore.

But Keri wanted a few things from her house.

"Don’t worry about the stupid house," Justin told her. "They’re just things."

"They're not just things," she said. "I want Lily’s birth album, and my soccer awards from high school, and that green shell necklace you bought me on our honeymoon."

That shell necklace was probably the cheapest thing in her jewelry box. But he said, "Okay, fine, I'll go get them."

They might have left something else useful in there, too.


"Come with me, Steph. I need a wingman."

"What do you need a wingman for?"

"To look out for carjackers."

"Oh, god," she said.

"No, just kidding. Well, I mean, not really kidding because there could be carjackers. More people are doing that kind of thing these days, but mostly I just want you to help me carry some stuff. You should practice driving manual, too. If the road sensors go down, the car isn’t going to drive itself for you. How long were you out jogging the other day before you got dizzy?"

She just stared at him, feeling like they were in immediate danger in a thousand different ways all at once. "Maybe twenty-five minutes," she said.

"Okay, we should have a little longer than that if we're careful." Justin set a timer on his phone.


Stephanie got into the driver's seat. "Hey, remember when we were kids and we used to play space invaders in the drain pipe and you always said that you got to be first pilot and I had to be the wingman because I was a girl and you were a boy?"

"Uh, yeah," he said.

"Guess what, buddy," she said with great swagger. "You’re the wingman now."

"You’ve been waiting a really long time to say that, haven’t you?"

"Maybe," she said.

"Was it good? Was it everything you dreamed it would be?"

"It was pretty satisfying."


When they got to the house, the front door locks were smashed open and the door was left ajar. Whoever had broken in had already left with what they wanted. All the paintings were gone. The electronics were gone. Even that horrible, rock-hard couch was gone. Justin couldn't even imagine why anyone would want it.

While Justin went to see the rest of the house, Stephanie stayed in the kitchen and filled some boxes with leftover things that looked useful, dry pasta and cans of tuna, laundry detergent, extra towels and blankets, batteries. Justin found Keri's soccer trophies and Lily’s birth album on the bookshelf, but Keri’s jewelry box was already looted. They took all of her expensive jewelry and her cheap shell necklace, too.


Stephanie went into the barren living room when the kitchen was done. There was nothing left except the rug which had muddy boot prints all over it, and a few of Lily’s toys. Her dollhouse looked like it had been stomped on.


Stephanie trotted the toy horses across an imaginary prairie for just a moment. It made her hope for their future again, because their girls deserved to be twenty-five years old some day with grownup lives of their own. They deserved to fall in love and make their own decisions and mistakes, and Stephanie wanted to be there to see it all. She had to hope that it would still happen.


"I was just thinking we should bring these back for Lily," she told Justin.

"Yeah, she’d like that," he said.

—

notes: really, look closely, you can see them! ;)

outtakes: springtime extras // birthday outtakes // Justin coming home to check on his girl

story notes on cars in the future: in 2085, "driving manual" is basically what we think of as just driving a car. The cars of the future are all electric and automatically driven in most urban and suburban areas. People would need to know a minimal amount of manual driving to get their licence, but most people in developed areas would soon forget how. Other people (young men, mostly) still enjoy the pleasure and control of manual driving, and there are places where it's still allowed, like the countryside, smaller cities, and the suburbs. In rural areas where there are no road sensors installed, everyone drives manual still. But in certain designated areas, like busy highways and large city centers, manual driving is prohibited and everyone must travel in automatic mode.